Dongbaek Agassi (Camellia Lady)

The record company did not expect much. Dongbaek Agassi was written by composer Baek Young-ho and lyricist Han San-do as the theme for a 1964 melodrama of the same name, starring Eom Aeng-ran and Shin Seong-il, about an island girl abandoned by a Seoul university student who ends up working in a bar called Camellia. According to Baek's son, the label thought the title sounded old-fashioned, so his father carried the record around Seoul's tearooms and music halls himself to promote it. The singer was Lee Mi-ja, then still fairly new. The song gave voice to a woman crying from longing as she waits for her lover, and Lee's sorrowful delivery made it a phenomenon. It is believed to be the first record in South Korean history to sell more than a million copies, and it turned Lee into the singer later called the Queen of Elegy. Then, at the height of its popularity, it was banned for sounding too Japanese. The most common explanation links the ban to the Korea-Japan Basic Treaty, pushed through over strong opposition; another theory blamed a line about red-bruised petals. Lee herself later recalled that pressure from a rival record company was behind it. People kept singing it anyway, passing it on by word of mouth for more than twenty years until it was officially cleared after the June Democratic Struggle of 1987. In a 2006 MBC survey of the songs Koreans love most, it still ranked second. A tearjerker that the government tried to silence outlived the ban.